In February of 2014 I spent five days in Detroit with DesignInquiry, a nonprofit educational organization that investigates design issues through team-based gatherings that bring together practitioners from different fields to generate new work and ideas around a single topic. The focuses of the Detroit venture were to frame questions and to initiate projects that might be carried out in the future.

The city got under my skin in ways I didn't anticipate. It is a city that in many ways made possible the America of which we dreamt in the last century. Sounds without bounds, flesh and metal and gasoline — Detroit was “Pax Americana,” as Charlie LeDuff describes it. “The birthplace of mass production, the automobile, the cement road, the refrigerator, frozen peas, high-paid blue collar jobs, home ownership and credit on a mass scale. America’s way of life was built here.” There’s a nostalgia-resonance in Detroit that me hit hard and deep.

Things are different now and there’s no going back. The slow-motion fall that few bothered to watch is laid bare in the cataclysmic blight that abounds today. A million people are gone. Eighty-five thousand vacants. Scant work and a mire of debt. Yet a perennial hope rises in the city. Dedicated residents and new transplants pioneer and remake spaces and neighborhoods, kindling new possibilities for entrepreneurship and creating new ways to work and live together. In a bleak post-industrial landscape, gardens of aspiration yield belief that a better future is possible. Detroit, in spite of it all, is a beacon of a re-imagined dream for humanity in the 21st century.

I returned to Detroit in December to commence work on a new project designed to capture something essential about the city and provide a means of conveyance for a distinctly valuable array of truths. The Detroit Gold Record project uses tools and methods of music, art, and design to provide a means for communicating Detroit's re-imagined dream to those of us floating on our own planets, living day-to-day in our own remote galaxies, perhaps yet to reckon with the full impact of profound and monumental change. The work began as part of an open-format, team-based residency with DesignInquiry at MOCAD's DEPE Space late last year. I constructed a recruiting office in the museum and registered Detroiters and friends of the city for the Detroit Voyager Program, an effort to crowdsource and document audiovisual messages from the city. The Detroit Voyager Program is kind of a a web-enabled culture probe that will guide a research and exploration process intended to reveal poetic insights about Detroit through the lens of the people who live there. Detroit Voyagers document their responses to "assignments" issued by the program through photographing, recording sound and video; writing, drawing, making; and uploading these responses to Instagram. By using Program-designated tags in Instagram, the reports of Detroit Voyagers are transmitted and archived by the Detroit Gold Record project. The project is an organically-growing digital fabric; a revelatory message from planet Detroit.

SiteWork's second exhibition of projects investigating the relationship between contemporary art and independent music occurred in September of 2014. SiteWork/Hopscotch again was comprised of project-based work initiated by two distinctly amazing artists: Ron Liberti and David Colagiovanni. Liberti's is a musician himself, and his twenty-plus years of vital screen print work manifests a huge part of the visual language of the independent music subculture in this part of North Carolina. Colagiovanni is a fascinating artist/composer dedicated to exploring and reconfiguring video, sound and space.

As an artist-led organization, SiteWork was able to work closely and collaboratively with both artists to support them as they took on projects with substantial practical and logistical complexity. This is where we see our real strength as a young organization: in our ability to connect with artists and establish mutual trust through shared experience.

Ron Liberti at CAM Raleigh (photo by Soleil Konkel)

Liberti's Paper Mix Tape activated the street-facing museum windows at CAM Raleigh with bold, layered and dramatically-scaled graphic imagery that referenced his work as a silkscreen poster artist.

Liberti installing at CAM Raleigh (photo by Soleil Konkel)

Colagiovanni, meanwhile, transformed Lump Gallery/Projects into an interactive music box loaded with mechanical instruments. For three days during the Hopscotch Music Festival, SiteWork and Colagiovanni hosted performers from the Hopscotch lineup at the gallery for improv sessions and performances, which were free and open to the public.

Just saw this video of Mac (Superchunk) and John (Mountain Goats) talking about music at Bull City Records. It's a pretty interesting conversation, but I can't help but be distracted by that sweet Eugene Chadbourne poster in the background. (It's one I designed this summer for a series of shows at Neptune's.)

Journey in Turiya is an homage to Alice Coltrane, the late musician and swamini of the Sai Anantam Ashram in California. Though widely known as the wife of jazz giant John Coltrane — and a crucial member of his late quintet — Alice Coltrane continued long after her husband’s passing to explore the frontiers of sound they’d begun to chart together. A genre-busting harpist, pianist, organist and composer who became a spiritual seeker, Alice Coltrane’s work and persona represent a relevant and timely model of hybrid artistic and spiritual practice.

This installation — which incorporates light, color, a levitating harp case, and continuous sound — functions as a meditation on art, music and spirituality, proposing the figure of Coltrane as a kind of aesthetic guru. Its title refers to Coltrane’s fourth solo album Journey in Satchidananda (1970), inspired by her association with Swami Satchidananda in the late ‘60s. Alice Coltrane became known as Turiya (transcendence, nirvana)— then Turiyasangitananda (the highest song of bliss) — as she deepened spiritually and worked to send “illuminating worlds of sound into the ethers of this universe” (as she describes in the liner notes to her 1971 album Universal Consciousness). This piece is inspired by Alice/Turiya, and represents the outcome of the artist’s effort to create a space in which one might consider the possibility of transcendence through an immersive aesthetic experience.

Journey in Turiya was part of the inaugural SiteWork/Hopscotch expo, Sept. 5–7, 2013, to coincide with the Hopscotch Music Festival. It was also part of Moogfest 2017 in Durham, NC.

Dedicated to Alice Coltrane and Franya J. Berkman.

Journey in Turiya was originally created with a 2013 Regional Artist Project Grant. The Regional Artist Project Grant is funded and administered by the United Arts Council of Raleigh and Wake County. This project is supported by the N.C. Arts Council, a division of the Department of Cultural Resources.The program is operated in partnership with the Franklin County Arts Council, Johnston County Arts Council, Vance County Arts Council and Warren County Arts Council.